Events

Bert Theis: For a Collage Philosophy

exhibition

sat. 29 Mar. - sun. 21 Sep.

Parabel vom Wasserbecken is the title of an unrealized book project by Luxembourgish artist Bert Theis (1952 – 2016) from 1986, rediscovered recently in his archives and turned into a publishing project. This series of collages is emblematic of the artist's work in the 1980s. It is based on the text by American author Edward Bellamy (1816–1886) The Parable of the Water Tank, a satire of capitalism drawn from his utopian novel Equality (1897), which was a big hit in socialist and anarchist circles of the time. Presented in an archive binder and organized in eleven chapters, the collages engage in dialogue with excerpts from the text. Beyond the original boards designed for this book, the exhibition showcases all of Bert Theis's collages created over different decades, highlighting many unpublished materials. More importantly, the exhibition raises the question: what is a collage, fundamentally? What does it mean, even historically, to work through collage? Isn't it a space of impurity, of contamination? Isn't it about pasting newspaper clippings coming from outside the studio, from the street and outside places reserved for art? Can we not imagine a three-dimensional collage, a collage that extends into the existential space? This is how we should consider Bert Theis’s famous Platforms as well as his Isola Art Center project in Milan: a large social collage. For Bert Theis, collage is not just a formal technique but rather a conceptual paradigm.

Good to know

In collaboration with the Bert Theis archive.

Biography
Bert Theis (1952-2016) lived and worked in Luxembourg and Milan. He belongs to the generation of artists who emerged at the start of the 90s and who approached the public space as a non-monumental and emerging zone with possibilities. He anchored his works in social contexts and relational modalities, however, not denouncing them as works of art. Bert Theis's works are always designed to be placed directly in the outer spaces of a city, even though the Luxembourg artist became famous for his participation in many significant international exhibitions, from the Venice Biennale in 1995, 'Skulptur. Projekte 'in Münster in 1997, Manifesta 2 in 1998 to the Gwangju Biennale in 2002 (South Korea). The hypothesis of a hyperactive society driven by excessive consumption forms the common backdrop of Bert Theis's works. His works attempt to inspire people to turn inward, towards spaces, places of rest, and relaxation platforms, able to temporarily form small communities of people, with an explicit reference to idyllic islands, to the utopia of a virgin land. In Theis's work, the openness to this vital life requires a rigorous utopian intellectual condition, and at the same time, something more extraordinary than daily existence, and subtly, an irony in the experience.
Automatically translated from French.

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